


breezeblocks

by maelidify



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: 18+, F/M, absolutely no mention of that dean nonsense, au in that there is a missing scene that would Change Things, brief mention of season three, mainly a psychological exploration of emotional masochism I guess, season four, with some kissin and hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-16
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-05 12:06:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13387476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it's more complicated than that.





	breezeblocks

First, it happens in silence.  
  
When she speaks to him after graduation, it happens in the heaviness of his absent voice. Rory tries to tell herself she’s being too _introspective_ and, after all, longing is not a beast personified so much as a feeling, something fleeting, something that isn’t real. The boy on the phone isn’t real. He once was, and is no longer, and in the space between those concepts, she feels a strange, sweet pain.  
  
She carries it with her.                
  
———

(“Do you ever _like_ missing someone?” she asks her mother that summer, dreamily walking the sidewalks of Venice and completely aware of dreamily walking the sidewalks of Venice.    
  
“Like a good miss? I feel that way about my parents every day,” she responds. “Hey, is it just me or is this water — ?”  
  
“Incredibly disgusting? Yes. The habitat of Italian swamp thing.”

“Only if he sweats constant swamp muck,” her mother says. They both shudder and Rory doesn’t approach the vacancy again.)  
  
———  
  
It’s like a dark window, and something dark peering through it. The absence and also, months later, this literal window, which belongs to a car in the cold, which belongs to him. He looks like a curled up child. A small monster.  
  
Something about him is always conducive to melodrama in her. She has been reading _Grendel_ in her spare time and so she thinks, somewhat bitterly, _out in the night, naked to the cold mechanics of the stars._  
  
“It’s freezing out here,” her mom says. “He could die.” Her dislike of this boy is always tangled in concern. Rory knows her well enough to know that. But _worry_ and _Jess_ are concepts that Rory cannot explore right now, cannot humanize and face and cover with a quilt.  
  
There is glass between them, and sleep and silence. It is more than Rory can take, and so she walks away, biting her lip hard.  
  
———  
  
(She tries very hard not to dream that night.  
  
After they drifted apart — after he drifted away quietly and angrily — she would dream of how it _should have gone_. The Platonic ideal of what their love could have been. Unshadowed, the exchange of books, the visits. His shoes on the floor of her dorm room. Waking up to his voice and Paris’s, fighting about Jack Kerouac in the common room. The glorious spiral of his future, of his mind, laid out for her to see. His body and whatever sharp things could be contained there, ready to kiss her or curl around her.  
  
_You are avoiding thinking about him_ , she tells herself as she drifts awake from half-dreams, _because you want him to be gone. His presence will never live up to what it could have been._  
  
But she knows it is more complicated than that.  
  
When she opens her eyes in the cold morning, her copy of _Howl_ is glaring at her, accusatory.)

———

The next day is a mosaic of retreat.  
  
When he says “ _I’m leaving”_ at Weston’s, a part of her quietly marvels at the precision of the pain. She wonders if he’s doing it on purpose, like he did back when he wanted to hurt her with Shane. The way he presented the image of himself with another girl. The tightening of his fist around her heart. There was an _end_ in mind back then, and a means, and the means was always a little shadowed, a little unkind.  
  
Barely a glimpse of him before the door is shut.  
  
Does he mean to leave her standing along with a still-empty coffee cup, something inside of her soft and (still? still) torn apart? She considers it, and tries anger again.   
  
If only she had made him leave. Grendel and the ram, _a howl unspeakable_. If only she could be vengeful— but he knows her too well for that.  
  
———  
  
(She walks to the bookstore alone and thinks about how sometimes, at school, Lane calls her and talks about missing Dave.  
  
“Be comforted by the fact that he’s probably sitting _longingly_ by the ocean, writing songs about you,” Rory said once, setting aside her schoolwork, carving out time for her friend and her faraway woes.  
  
“Oh, that’s all I’m thinking about at any given time,” her friend said with a self-aware sigh. “I guess they say absence makes the heart grow fonder.”  
  
_No,_ Rory thinks now, _it’s more complicated than that._ )    
  
———  
  
The mosaic continues in the bookstore, that same day. There he is, reading in the corner, and then he leaves like a bullet. Rory tries not to dwell on the burst of feeling. Seeing, parting, seeing, parting. Some sort of sick rhythm to this. An algorithm, of sorts, but she doesn’t know much about algorithms.  
  
He is compactable. A spring constantly waiting to slink away. The pain of his leaving makes the gap in her chest grow bigger so, of course, action needs to be taken and she is nothing if not pragmatic.   
  
She finds him later, sitting on the bridge. Of course the bridge. He looks out at the water in near-sunset the same way she looks out at her idiotic dreams ( _torn between tears and a bellow of scorn_ , the monster running from the woman who comes to the castle, something we all know we cannot have—)  
  
but Jess isn’t a beast clawing his way through the forest, speaking with metaphorical dragons. The bitterness of _him_ , that anger, that unfitting puzzle piece— none of it is a metaphor and neither is it logical. None of it is needed.  
  
Still.  
  
She sits next to him. She allows herself the melodrama and thinks _I will choke on you, if necessary, to get your vacancy from my head_.   
  
His eyes glance over her quickly as though she were white-hot, painful to see. His sudden, angry kiss, then, shouldn’t be unexpected—  
  
And, of course, she responds. Pulls him closer by the arms of his leather jacket. Notes his exhale of air when his hands slip under her coat. She remembers telling her mother _it might happen soon_. She remembers the unwanted almost at the party. She is too logical, too irreverent to partake consistently in his stormcloud, but she opens her mouth against his, gasps when he runs his thumb over her breast, still over her shirt.   
  
She can see in his eyes that he’ll stop, wordless, or keep going, wordless, depending on what she wants. Neither decision will count. This moment is their cheat. There is no one around in this dusk and she nods, locking eyes, tangling her hands in his hair. There is pain in his face, always there, always soft, and his kiss is searing in the cold. His hand slips beneath the fabric, cool and rough against her skin and she gasps again as the kiss deepens.    
  
Her logic will return. She can’t hold it off for long, even if she tells it _this is preventative, this is a rite of expulsion._ But it is still at bay and she lets him trace her hip, slip his hand under her skirt, thumb around the parts of her most sensitive, most reactive. His lips on her neck, lonely and unsure. She is straddling him now, _still no one around_ , rocking against him in something she doesn’t recognize, and the overwhelming feeling of his tongue and teeth on her clavicle—  
  
She needs his vulnerability. So she locks eyes with him, that gentle sharpness in him, and slips her hand into his jeans. That soft-hard part of him she’d never searched for, wrapped clumsily in her fingers. He closes his eyes for a second, a kind of basking in intensity she _recognizes_ , and then he opens them again and meets hers. That look again, like she hurts his eyes— he deftly untangles himself, pushing her gently away, stands up quickly. A spring. _I’m leaving_ , he doesn’t say.   
  
Rory remains seated, trembling just slightly. She tries not to watch him walk away, but she does.

\---  
  
(She runs from him later. And he speaks this time, says _Rory, wait,_  catches up with her and her flushed face and all the things she doesn’t and does want to be feeling spilling out around her shoulders.  
  
“I love you,” he says, and then (of course? of course) he leaves.  
  
_I want you to leave_ , she thinks, stubbornly, _because it means you might still come back.)_    
  
\---  
  
Months later, he is a spark that finds its way to her dorm, bristling with something.  
  
She is trying to forget. _Grendel_ didn’t come to school with her this semester, and neither did _Howl_. She is valuing stability, which logic dictates, and ignoring the sweet emotionality of loss. It’s all going very well.   
  
When he crashes in, it interrupts everything.  
  
“I’m ready for this,” he is saying. Desperate. He wants her to run away with him, and he’s certainly using his words. “You can count on me now. I know you couldn’t count on me before, but you can now. You can.”  
  
There it is — the conclusion he has reached. All of their silence and pain, all of the _her_ he once knew, and he wants to re-contextualize. He wants to make it into a new thing, not the hurt thing that it is. How strangely myopic of him.  
  
She tells him _no_. She tells him she doesn’t want him, and carefully, volatile, holding all of her hurt inside her like a fistful of rocks, watches the pain etch itself across his face.  
  
It will turn itself into a crack in his heart, she tries not to tell herself. He will visit and revisit it. He will think of her, and find only a vacancy.

**Author's Note:**

> .  
> .  
> .  
> .  
> .  
> .  
>  The title is from the alt-j song. This one-shot is also littered with references to John Gardner's _Grendel_ because I had to be extra.


End file.
